Gone with the Whisker

by Laurie Cass

  After a few minutes, I shook my head. “There are some anomalies, but we know the why of most of them.”

  Julia nodded. “Darla Holton and John Currie didn’t show up for the first July stop because they both had family in from all over the country and didn’t have time.”

  “Mrs. Karden showed up in July but not in June because of her husband’s surgery.”

  “Bob Balogh was only here in June because he and his wife are taking a road trip up the Alaska Highway.”

  “And Mary Santos was only here this last time because she’s been working double shifts at the brewing company but finally got a day off.” I was once again reminded of how much we knew about our patrons, information that came easily on the bookmobile but would never have happened in the bricks and mortar library. It was just different out here.

  “There are a couple of others,” Julia said. “But they’re all absences, not presences, if you know what I mean.”

  Somehow, I did. “And it’s hard to see how an absence could have anything to do with a motive for murder.”

  “Really?” Julia did the one-eyebrow thing. “I can see all sorts of reasons. A husband promising to pick up a book, but forgetting.” She tsk’ed. “A regular patron, instead of coming here, instead dallied with the mail carrier and the spouse caught them.”

  I could tell she was winding up for a long litany of murder motives that she’d read or imagined or acted in. “Yes, fine, there are probably an infinite number of possibilities, but knowing our regular bookmobile patrons, and of who is missing, can you think of any realistic ones?”

  “Well,” she said, “if you’re going to insist on reality, boring as it is, then no. I can’t think of anything.”

  My brain circled around lazily. “So we have Violet, who was angry at both Rex and Nicole for checking out books she wanted, and . . .” I stopped. It was starting to feel like a story problem in algebra class. “So,” I said slowly, “could something possibly have happened when Nicole and Rex were here on the bookmobile that led to their murders?”

  “Seems far-fetched.” Julia yawned. “Because wouldn’t Violet be dead, too? And the two of us? Oh, I know, you think we’re in danger, but I haven’t seen hide nor hair of a killer in the last three weeks, so I feel pretty safe.”

  I wished I did.

  * * *

  * * *

  That evening I deposited Eddie back onto the houseboat and checked the whiteboard for Kate’s whereabouts. She’d written, Working late at Pam’s, sleeping up the hill at Aunt Frances and Otto’s if that’s okay, followed by a stick figure with beads of sweat pouring off that, if you used a lot of imagination, could have looked like Kate.

  I stood there, staring at the board. So there was hope. Hope that I wasn’t the worst aunt in the history of the universe. Hope that the two of us would eventually grow into a happy and comfortable niece-aunt relationship. Hope things would all work out.

  Smiling to myself, smiling at the world in general, I headed back outside, where it had grown even hotter and more humid though I wouldn’t have thought it possible.

  “How do people in Florida stand it?” I asked.

  Louisa Axford, who was starting charcoal in one of the marina’s grills installed for the boaters, looked up. “Stand what?” she asked.

  “This weather.” I took the neck of my T-shirt and fluffed it up and down, trying to get some air movement. “Hot. Humid. Bleah.”

  “You have the question all wrong,” Louisa said, glancing up at the hazy sky. “It’s not how do people in Florida stand the heat, it’s how do people Up North stand the winters?” She shivered, and I wasn’t sure it was fake. “Cold and snowy for weeks at a time, with maybe a single day of sunshine a month to tide you over? No thank you.”

  I’d long ago stopped trying to convince Louisa of the joys of winter—that the transformations a fresh snowfall wrought were wondrous, that the one sunny day was so gorgeously brilliant it made all the cloudy ones fade from memory, and that venturing out into winter’s sharp cold made you feel brave and adventurous, even when you weren’t—and we’d agreed to disagree about what climate was best for human habitation.

  Louisa dribbled the charcoal with lighter fluid and lit it with a match. She eyed the conflagration, poked at the pile of bricks with tongs, and nodded with satisfaction. “Steak should be done in forty-five minutes. Do you and Kate want to come over? We have extra.”

  I explained Kate’s whereabouts. “And I need to get to the house. Rafe promised to pick up dinner.”

  “Sub sandwiches?” She laughed. “Veggie with extra cheese for you?”

  “When you have a good rut going, it’s best to stay in it,” I said.

  “Unless you’re tired of your nice, comfy rut,” Louisa said. “I hear it happens.”

  “I’ll let you know.” I sketched a wave and walked off, stopping at the front steps of the house. There was a law enforcement officer on the porch, slouched in a chair with his feet up on the railing, paging through what looked like a recent copy of Field & Stream. “Are you here to help or hinder?” I asked.

  Ash looked up. “Can’t I do both?”

  “Sure,” I said, climbing the wood stairs and pulling a chair around to match Ash’s arrangement, which looked so comfortable I couldn’t believe I hadn’t tried it myself. “Just not at the same time. Where’s Rafe?”

  “Hunting and gathering.”

  “Are you staying? Please say yes. We need to install upper cabinets in the master bath, and my height efficiency isn’t exactly a help in this case.”

  He nodded. “That’s why Rafe’s getting three subs plus loaded potato skins.”

  “Perfect.” I sat and put my feet up on the railing. It was a stretch for me, but still comfortable, and I gave a sigh of contentment. “What would be nice out here is a ceiling fan.”

  Ash eyed me. “What, for the six days a year it gets this hot?”

  “Do you have a problem with that?” I asked, closing my eyes.

  He turned a page. “Not really. But I’m guessing it’s not going to be at the top of Rafe’s punch list.”

  Though I figured a ceiling fan was more a change order than a punch list item, Ash was probably right. “Speaking of murders,” I said, and ignored Ash’s heavy sigh. And then before he could object that I was making him work when he was off duty, I went on. “First off, I have to tell you about Kate.”

  “How’s she doing?” Ash asked. “She was pretty upset after the fireworks, and I get it. Stumbling across a dead body on TV or the movies isn’t anything like it is in real life.”

  No, it wasn’t. On the screen there was no indication that the sounds, tastes, and smells that accompanied such a traumatic experience would forever remind you of what had happened. I figured that, the rest of my life, whenever I heard Beyoncé’s “Crazy in Love,” I’d think about Nicole, because that song was playing on the radio as we drove home that awful afternoon. And I wasn’t exactly looking forward to the fireworks next July. So if it was this bad for me, who was reasonably close to a fully functional adult, how must the adolescent Kate be feeling?

  “She’s doing okay,” I finally said. “She hasn’t had a nightmare in almost a week.” As far as I knew. “But she’s come up with a theory I promised to share with you.”

  He settled a bit farther down in his chair and crossed his ankles. “I had no idea that messing around with murder investigations had a genetic component.”

  “The theory,” I said, ignoring his comment, “is that Fawn, Rex’s wife, and Dominic, Nicole’s husband, have been having an affair. And to avoid lengthy and costly divorce proceedings, which Dominic didn’t believe in anyway because he’s a really devout Catholic, Dominic killed Rex and Fawn killed Nicole. Which was why they had alibis for the murder of their spouses.” I was embellishing a bit, but now that I was saying it out loud, I was warming to the idea. />
  Ash, however, did not look convinced. “One question.” He yawned. “Do you have any evidence that Fawn and Dominic knew each other? E-mails, letters, witnesses.”

  Of course not. “I think it’s a possibility that’s worth looking into.”

  “Sure,” he said. “I’ll get on that, right after I work through those other theories you’ve tossed into my lap. How many were there for Rex Stuhler? There’s Fawn, naturally. And John and Nandi Jaquay, plus Barry Vannett. And who have you come up with for Nicole Price?”

  I refrained from pointing out that Fawn had been their own first suspect. “I have some thoughts.”

  “Of course you do,” he murmured.

  “Hark!” I said, holding my hand to my ear. “Do I hear the echo of Detective Hal Inwood?”

  Ash clutched his chest. “Ooo, that hurt. Stop it, already.”

  “If you promise to listen to me, sure.”

  “Since it’s way too hot to move, and it’s pretty comfortable here, I don’t have much choice.”

  “That’s what I like in law enforcement,” I said. “A captive audience.”

  And I proceeded to tell him about what I’d discovered in the last week or so. That Violet Mullaly had expressed deep anger about the library books Rex and Nicole each had just before Rex was killed. That Lowell grew up in the same town where Nicole taught, and had acted oddly when I’d casually asked him about it. That Mason at the convenience store had been friendly up until I’d started talking about Nicole and Rex. The only possibility I didn’t mention was Courtney Drew, the home health aide, who’d worked with Rex’s mom, because that didn’t seem like enough, even for me.

  “Violet Mullaly, Lowell Kokotovich, and Mason Hiller.” Ash pulled a large cell phone out of his front pocket. He tapped away without saying anything.

  Finally, I couldn’t take it any longer. “What are you doing?”

  “Oh, just looking,” he said idly. “How do you spell ‘Mullaly’? Okay, thanks, that’s . . . huh.”

  He stared at the screen.

  “What?” I asked. “Something about Violet? What is it?”

  Ash shook his head and slid the phone back into his pocket. “Looks like dinner is coming up the sidewalk,” he said, standing. “Want anything out of Rafe’s fridge?”

  I shook my head and let him go without pressing for answers. Clearly, he’d learned something about Violet, and he’d tell me when he could. And if I couldn’t wait that long, I could always drop by the sheriff’s office and not go away until they shared.

  “You look happy,” Rafe said, dropping the bags of food on the porch table.

  I smiled up at his handsome self. “That’s because I am.”

  * * *

  * * *

  The next morning I embarked on a new outreach venture. Instead of trying to combine bookmobile trips with dropping off books to shut-ins, I’d decided to try using my own vehicle to do the drop-offs.

  “Only in the summer,” I’d told Eddie as I was leaving. My fuzzy-headed buddy was sitting on top of his cat carrier and clearly ready to head out for a day of bookmobiling.

  “Mrr?” He looked at me in a questioning manner.

  “Because in the summer there are a lot more people around,” I explained patiently. “Word has spread that people who qualify as shut-ins can have books picked up and dropped off, and it’s getting too hard to mesh their needs with the bookmobile’s route and schedule. It’s cheaper for the library to pay me mileage than it is to drive the bookmobile to all these people’s houses.”

  Eddie stood and scratched at the carrier with his front feet, then his back feet.

  I watched him for a moment. “If you’re trying to bury that, it’s not working.”

  “Mrr!”

  “No, you’re not coming. You wouldn’t like it, honest. It’s going to be mostly driving and you’d never get out of the carrier. Remember the last time I took you downstate?”

  We’d driven to Dearborn to stay with my parents over Christmas, and I’d taken Eddie because everyone I might have left him with was either out of town or coming along. My dad’s allergies meant that Eddie had to live, work, and play in my bedroom, but that wasn’t the hard part.

  It had turned out that Eddie didn’t care for car rides when the car was driving faster than sixty miles an hour. And when Eddie didn’t like something, everyone knew about it. Aunt Frances, Otto, and I had endured four hours of nonstop howling on the way down and another four hours on the way back up. The three humans had made a shuddering vow never to do that again, and so far we’d kept our promise.

  Of course, a trip around Tonedagana County wasn’t likely to provide many opportunities for driving that fast, but there were a couple of straight stretches of county highway on the east side, so it might happen.

  “See you tonight,” I said, leaning down to kiss the top of his furry head.

  But he collapsed himself, missing my gesture of endearment by an inch, then jumped down and ran off with thumping feet.

  “Have a good day,” I called. “I’ll miss you!”

  Though he called back—“Mrr!!”—I was pretty sure he wasn’t returning my sentiment.

  Four hours later, by the time I arrived at the home of Rupert and Ann Marie Wiley, I’d decided I was never again going to do a book run.

  “Not like this anyway,” I said, gratefully taking the chair they offered me on their front porch.

  “What do you mean?” Ann Marie asked. “No, wait. Let me get you something. I just made some lemonade, this heat simply calls for it, and I made some brownies this morning before it got hot because I knew you were coming, and—” She saw my expression of dismay. “But you like brownies. Don’t you?”

  “Used to,” I muttered.

  Ann Marie frowned, but Rupert had already caught on. Nodding, he said, “Bet you’ve been offered brownies, cookies, pie, or coffee cake at every place you stopped this morning.”

  “You forgot the bagels and doughnuts. And everyone’s so nice, how could I say no?”

  Ann Marie laughed. “You’re going to have to learn fast; otherwise you’ll get too big to fit in the bookmobile.”

  I patted my stomach, then winced, which made her laugh all the harder. “So kind of you to laugh at my misfortune.”

  “It’s what she does,” her loving husband said. “You should hear her when I’m trying to put on my socks.”

  “Now that’s funny.” Ann Marie pointed at Rupert. “Plumber’s cracks are nothing compared to—”

  “Come to think of it,” I said, interrupting before I got an image in my head I’d never be able to erase. “A glass of your lemonade would taste great.”

  Rupert watched her go, then he turned to me and rubbed his hands. “Now. What did you bring me?”

  I handed the books over. “Have you finished all the others I dropped off?”

  “Waiting for you inside.” He touched his chest. “I should be able to drive soon,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry to make this extra work for you, but Ann Marie’s medications . . . well, let’s just say that getting behind a wheel wouldn’t be good for her. We hope she has a lot of years left, but . . .” He shook his head.

  “It’s not extra work,” I said quickly. “I’m happy to do this.” As I watched him open Jane Smiley’s Some Luck, I thought about what I’d learned so many times over: that you could never really know what was going on in people’s lives, and that you rarely knew what burdens people were carrying. All I’d known regarding Rupert’s request for a book stop was that for six weeks, no one in the house would be able to drive. I’d had no idea that Ann Marie had serious medical issues, and the knowledge that she did was deeply saddening.

  “Happy to,” I said again, this time more firmly.

  “And at least you keep your car in decent repair.” Rupert shot a look at my modest sedan. “That Courtney’s
dripped oil all over the driveway. I swear she parked in a different spot every time she came here.”

  “Noisy, too,” Ann Marie said as she came through the front door, laden with a tray. “No, you sit down, Minnie. I can do all this. Rupert would just get to nodding off in his chair and up that girl would drive. Don’t know if she even had a muffler on that thing. Or if she ever washed it. And those bumper stickers, my goodness. They’re nice and colorful, but the things they say aren’t anything I’d want our preacher to see.”

  Something in my head went “click.” The last time I’d stopped at Ann Marie and Rupert’s house, Courtney, their home health aide, had been there, and I’d seen her car, but not the rear bumper. Could it have been the same car that had driven past the bookmobile on the day Rex and Nicole had been on the bookmobile for the last time?

  “Those bumper stickers,” I said slowly. “Are they bright pink?”

  Ann Marie handed me a glass of lemonade. “They certainly are. Shocking pink, they used to call it. Now I don’t think anything shocks anyone.”

  So Courtney had indeed driven down Brown’s Road that day.

  But what did it mean? Everything . . . or nothing?

  Chapter 16

  My niece stared at me over her half-empty plate. “You want me to do what?”

  The heat had abated somewhat from the previous few days, and she’d come back to the marina early that morning. Partly because she’d run out of clean clothes and partly because Louisa had texted her, asking for babysitting services until she had to get to work, which would enable Louisa and Ted to run errands approximately ten thousand times faster than if they had a toddler in tow.

  Kate had, apparently, been happy to do so, and when she’d returned after a few hours at Pam Fazio’s Older Than Dirt, I’d surprised her with a home-cooked dinner. Okay, it was spaghetti from a box with sauce from a jar, but Kristen had snobbed me up enough, food-wise, to want fresh Parmesan cheese instead of dried, and grating cheese counted as cooking to me.